Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
Check out my other blog at taboo-truths.blogspot.com

Saturday, February 22, 2014

This might be a first in U.S.
Imperialist history: trying to overthrow three governments at the
same time. Namely in Ukraine, Thailand, and Venezuela. It's a feat
you might see in an Olympics of Imperialism, or maybe something an
overachieving empire would do. There may be even more governments the U.S.
is currently working to destabilize, of course; these three are just
very blatant examples that are visible to the naked eye, as it were.

The coup attempt in Ukraine appears on
the verge of success. The president has disappeared. His allies in
parliament are jumping ship. The police are withdrawing, and if we
can believe Western media reports (always a big IF, given their
propensity for disinformation- akalying) some
police even have joined the “protesters.” (Maybe they can put in
a word for their colleagues the rebels are holding hostage.)

One of the surefire signs of U.S.
“foreign policy objectives” is how the establishment media
“covers” (slants and distorts) a story. In all three cases, the
clear preference of this media, and thus indirectly of the U.S.
state, is obvious. In Venezuela, the U.S. media (and British and
other overseas U.S. lapdog media) has demonized Hugo Chavez since Day
One, not because of incompetence per se (as if they
automatically oppose incompetent rulers and support competent ones)
but because of the class interests Chavez openly championed, namely
the “lower” classes- the majority of Venezuelans. Now that Chavez
is dead, his successor Nicolas Maduro has to deal with U.S.
subversion and hostility. So far on three occasions the Venezuelan
government has had to expel U.S. “diplomats” trying to provoke
unrest and subvert the government. The latest batch were trolling for
troublemakers on college campuses. Their cover story? “Visa
outreach.” Good one, State Department! You made me laugh! (I'm sure
the people with Wrong Thoughts who have been put through the grinder
trying to get a U.S. visa would enjoy that joke. People
seeking U.S. visas go to the U.S. consulates or embassies. U.S. staff
don't go hunting for people to give visas to- unless they're up to no
good.)

But Maduro has shown weakness. Suddenly
he's asking to talk to Obama to straighten things out with the U.S.
Big mistake. Now the U.S. is going to increase the pressure,
since it sees it's working. So the U.S. is coming closer to its goal
of reestablishing a bourgeois class dictatorship in Venezuela.

In the case of Thailand, this clear
class bias in favor of the upper classes everywhere and hostility to
the majority of the world's people manifests in sympathy for the Thai
minority that is rebelling against the government and even prevented
voting in parts of the country. The alleged Great Devotion To
Democracy that the U.S. government and media profess was nowhere on
display- no condemnation of this prevention of voting, in fact barely
any mention of it, much less detailed coverage. “Even” NPR and
the BBC (UK) were slanted, though if you listened carefully to
the facts they presented, the facts belied the interpretation and
framework those organizations placed on the situation (requiring them to ignore their own facts). In Thailand a
distinct minority of the population- the elites, the privileged- is
trying once again to overthrow an elected leaders. (They have one
coup under their belt already, thanks to the Thai military, who drove
out the brother of the current head of state, in the process
violently suppressing his supporters who rallied behind him.) That
time too, “the” media sided with the coupists and against the
majority.

In the case of Ukraine, the media
“bias” has been the most outrageous. There, violent demonstrators
have occupied government buildings in the heart of Kiev, the capital,
for three months, and barricaded the area. They have violently
attacked police, starting with paving stones and dumping cold water
on them in the freezing winter, then escalating to Molotov cocktails
(homemade firebombs), and just recently shooting a policeman dead and
hurling a grenade in their midst, costing another cop his leg.

Yet the Western media have presented
these goons (spearheaded by fascists) as the Good Guys, and the
police as the Bad Guys. New laws designed to control the violence of
the “protesters” and take back the part of the capital city and
government buildings held hostage by them were immediately labeled as
“anti-protest laws” by propaganda organs such as NPR, the BBC,
and CBS. (Those are ones I heard it on; there are probably others.)
The protesters were said to be “defending their right to protest.”
Western governments weighed in on this grave violation of human
rights (while maintaining their silence on the real repression
going on in Bahrain, to cite just one example, or Israel, or Jordan,
or just about any client state or satrapy of the U.S. bloc). The
“democratic West” thus maintains its consistency and continues
its traditions of hypocrisy and double-standards. (For more on Ukraine go to democracynow.org and search for the interviews Stephen Cohen gave on the subject.)

Care to speculate how such protesters
would be handled in any Western capital? Based on the violent
repression of peaceful protesters in the U.S., for example,
most recently the Occupy Movement, we can confidently predict a
bloodbath would be the response. During the black riots in American
cities, “looters” were shot by the scores by State Police, local
police, and National Guardsmen. (Scores of dead were the “official”
count in the various cities, a count which isn't trustworthy of
course because the repressive state and Federal governments doing the
killing were issuing those numbers, meaning they had an incentive to
lowball the numbers. The corporate propaganda media faithfully
transmitted these death tolls to the public as “fact.”) Airborne
Divisions were even kept stateside instead of going to Vietnam to
fight there, in order to have a reliable domestic-suppression force.
Yet Obama has the nerve to threaten the Ukrainian government with
“consequences” if they “cross that line” and refuse his
demand to withdraw security forces from the scene of the
occupation! At the same time, Obama blamed “the violence”
entirely on the regime, with the U.S. media (and BBC) marching in
lockstep behind this line. Obama imposed a Catch-22 on the Ukrainian president, simultaneously demanding that he withdraw the police, AND "end the violence." Since the protesters are committing violence, police action is required to end violence. [1]

Now, I don't care who rules Ukraine, or
whether the ELECTED president of Ukraine signs or doesn't sign a
trade deal with the EU. He was going to sign, and Russian pressure
apparently caused him to change his mind. It's also a fact that
Europe and the U.S. have been aggressively pushing the border of
their economic and military sphere right up to the border of Russia
ever since the Soviet Union collapsed. (Wonder how the U.S. would
react if the Russians were grabbing Canada and Mexico into their
sphere! It would probably be war.)

The U.S. and EU aren't even willing to
wait for the next Ukrainian presidential election next year-
apparently they don't want to risk “losing.” (As if it should be
any of their business.) Hence the drive for the coup. The fact is,
the people of Ukraine are divided as to which way their country
should lean- East or West. This is a fact rarely alluded to in the
mendacious media “coverage,” which assiduously gives the
impression that the entire Ukrainian people are rising up against an
intolerable regime.(Not jumping into bed with the EU by signing a
trade treaty apparently is beyond the pale.) [2]

It's a textbook example of how
a small nation that doesn't do EXACTLY what the U.S. Empire and its
lackeys demand has its government overthrown. There are numerous such
cases- two of the most notorious being Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in
1954. As in the current Ukraine case, the demands in those cases were
also economic. [3]

Obama is a classic overachiever, a very
dangerous personality type to have as U.S. Emperor. With the immense
destructive power of the U.S. at his disposal, such a character, with
an ego-driven mania for “accomplishments,” can do tremendous harm
in the world- and Obama has certainly caused his share of misery,
suffering, and death so far. He has also inflicted lasting damage on
human rights inside the U.S., by his lead role in the destruction of
personal privacy via the omnisurveillance system centered around the
NSA, which he has championed and protected (and attempted to sneak
past the people under a cloak of secrecy- hence the revilement of
whistleblower Edward Snowden by the establishment power structure.)
[4]

1] To
mention just a couple of examples of the repression of peaceful
Occupy protesters, in “liberal” New York City, OBEYING a police
order was cause to be pepper-sprayed and/or arrested by the police
and falsely charged with crimes. The facts are well-established. The
police led 750 marchers onto a bridge in order to capture them and
take them into captivity and falsely charge them. And there's the
notorious case of the vicious Inspector Anthony Bologna, who
gratuitously pepper-sprayed two women who were standing exactly where
he had ordered them to stand. Obviously Bologna is a reactionary
fanatic who hates his political/ideological enemies (enemies in his
mind- unfortunately most of the victimized dissidents haven't figured
out that the police are their
enemies, despite ample evidence over many years- violent assault,
false arrests, malicious prosecutions, infiltration, surveillance,
sabotage, disruption- everything a police state like the U.S. does to
dissidents). Unfortunately for Bologna, he forgot to take them into
a back room in a police lair to torture them, instead doing it right
on the street in front of numerous witnesses and being recorded in
his criminal act. Police Commissar Raymond Kelly, Master of
Repression, was forced to dock Bologna a few days of paid vacation
time as a result. Pretty mild punishment for a high-ranking officer
publicly committing a malicious assault. Bologna maintained his rank,
power, and authority in the New York City Police. (Known as the
NYPD.)

2] American reporter
David Stern let slip on the BBC the morning of February 22 that “as
much as 46%” of Ukrainians support the overthrow movement. I.e.
Maximally, less than half of Ukrainians want to oust
the president by force. Real democratic. Notice that Stern and
BBC waited until the coup is almost complete to mention this rather
significant fact.

What's also ignored in the Western
media propaganda offensive is the fact that eastern Ukraine is
economically dependent on Russia, and the people there favor not
alienating Moscow as a result. They're Ukrainians too, not just the
cop-killers in Kiev. (They've killed about a dozen cops so far, by the way, a fact Western media now hides by lumping the police deaths in with all deaths, as in "X number of people have died in the violence," implying they're all dead coupsters.)

3] In Iran, Prime
Minister Mohammad Mossadegh committed the grave crime of deciding
that his nation should get more than a negligible share of revenues
from Iranian oil. The British oil firm British Petroleum (now the
criminal, incorrigible polluter BP) ran to its government, which got
the U.S. to help in a joint CIA-MI-6 coup. In the case of Guatemala,
President Jacobo Arbenz naively thought that he could appropriate
unused land held by the United Fruit Company, and pay compensation in
the value that United Fruit had stated on its Guatemalan tax returns
for the land, and allow poor peasants a shot at a decent living. This
was an unconscionable theft in UFC's eyes, so they went whining to
the U.S. Government, where two former elite corporate lawyers from
the criminal firm Sullivan and Cromwell, now had their bloody paws on
the top levers of power- Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, and
his brother Allen, Director of Central Intelligence. (CIA boss.) In
short order they got President Eisenhower on board to brand Arbenz a
“communist” and arrange a CIA coup there (as in Iran). In both
cases, the coups ended democracy in both countries, and it hasn't
returned. In both countries, massive slaughters of civilians ensued
in the following decades, carried out by state terrorist regimes
coached by the U.S., especially the CIA, U.S. military, and State
Department.

If Arbenz had read up on history, he
might have realized how dangerous his move was. The U.S. already had
a history, going back at least aa century, of attacking Latin
American nations whenever some rich Americans were displeased with a
situation. For example, in 1854, a century before the Guatemalan
coup, it was necessary for the U.S. Navy to burn down the Nicaraguan
port town of San Juan del Norte. Why? Because when American plutocrat
Cornelius Vanderbilt sailed his yacht into town, the local
authorities had the effrontery to try and levy port charges on his
boat. Clearly a corrective lesson for the natives was in order. This
also nicely illustrates, as do most such cases of U.S. imperial
criminality, that ultimately U.S. power is deployed on behalf of
American plutocratic interests, whether corporate or even individual,
as in this case. And no crumb is too small for the Big Dog to snatch
away from the world's poor.

Yes, that really happened. It's amazing
all the dirty shit in American history that those in power manage to
bury with barely a trace that it ever happened. Of course, this is
only possible because of the willing assistance provided by such
accomplices as “teachers,” “professors,” “scholars,” and
“journalists,” the main indoctrinators and keepers of “truth.”
A handful of actual historians, such as the late Howard Zinn, have
rescued the interred bones of history from the enforced amnesia of
establishment guardian priests of ideological rectitude.

Here's an excerpt from a presentation
by Noam Chomsky in 1985 that mentions some of the U.S.' depredations
in Latin America, which the U.S. Imperium still calls “our
hemisphere,” as in “we own it.” (See the glorious “Monroe
Doctrine,” which declared the Western hemisphere off-limits to
European imperialisms. “Our” doesn't mean “we happen to be
located here,” it means “it's ours.”) Chomsky insightfully
illuminates the sham pretexts the U.S. uses for its aggression and
domination.

4] By the way, the BBC
in the last couple of days referred to Edward Snowden as “infamous,”
as in “the infamous Edward Snowden,” like it's an objective fact.
And that wasn't in a commentary, but the intro to a “news” piece,
offered as a matter-of-fact-descriptive. They don't even call Bashir
al-Assad that! (The Butcher of Syria.) They've outdone even U.S. “news” organs
with that one. (Some people are of the opinion that Snowden is
“infamous.” It is not a fact and far from a universal view. Some
regard him as a hero. Thus the BBC could have called him “hero
Edward Snowden” with equal validity. A more neutral, objective term
would be whistleblower. NOT "leaker"- leakers are anonymous. And they're usually "officials" hiding behind anonymity to plant propaganda in the media. Most thinks the establishment media calls "leaks" are really propaganda plants by those in state power.)

Anyway, Thank You, “Great” Britain,
for being so slavishly and sycophantically loyal to your U.S.
masters! I know the U.S. imperialists take you for granted, so I'll
thank you on their behalf, you rotten propagandist wankers.